The Baby Borrowers

With the UK’s teenage pregnancy rate currently the highest in Europe, BBC Three launches its Coming Of Age Season with The Baby Borrowers, an ambitious social experiment filmed over the course of a month that takes teenage couples on a rollercoaster ride of adult responsibility and allows them to discover what it’s really like to be a parent.

Dynamic and compelling, the series, stripped over two weeks, gives five teenage couples a taste of adult life on fast-forward.

Aged between 16 and 19, the teens are thrown in at the deep end: given real houses and real responsibilities, the most important of which is to look after children from a range of age groups, from babies to teenagers.

Each young couple is set a series of tasks to perform to find out if they are ready for all that adult life brings – juggling everything from parenting and work to the household budget and their relationship.

Through tears and tantrums, the teen couples mimic the cliches of adult life. Viewers see whether they can cope with real babies and toddlers, whether they decide to stay together at the end of it all, and what they say to their own parents when they get home after the most memorable month of their lives so far.

The baby borrowers will air each night next week on BBC Three at 10.30pm